AB/Meetings

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< AB

Meeting Schedule

Teleconferences

The AB holds teleconference meetings twice monthly, currently (barring f2f meeting conflicts):

  • 14:00-15:00 UTC every 1st Thursday of the month
  • 14:00-16:15 UTC every 3rd Thursday of the month

Meeting details, agenda etc., on Member-only wiki.

Face to face meetings

The AB also typically meets for several longer hybrid meetings (face-to-face for some, remote for those who cannot attend in person) every year:

  • Winter AB meeting
  • Spring AC meeting participation, and an adjacent AB meeting
  • Summer AB meeting (the "transition" meeting, held after AB elections so incoming and outgoing members can both attend)
  • Fall AB meeting is generally held NOT at TPAC, to enable better AB member engagement in TPAC

Upcoming f2f meetings

See AB/Meetings/Planning for thoughts & constraints on future meeting plans. 2023:

  • ...

2024:

  • ...
  • After May AC meeting
  • ...

CFC Procedure

Outside of meetings, the AB may take decisions on specific, concrete proposals using the following Call for Consensus procedure:

  • The proposal must not change once put for testing
  • The call for consensus must stand alone (not as part of another issue / thread).
  • The issue/thread must be clearly labeled as a Call for Consensus, and must include "CFC" in the title.
  • The person who makes the call for proposal should close it, with a stated conclusion.
  • For a formal AB decision, the deadline to reply must be at least two weeks.
  • For a formal AB decision, Consensus is at least {number of AB Members (including chair) - 3} votes in favour and none against. [Note: This count assumes an AB of 9 - 11 elected members.]

Work mode

The AB manages its issues in Github, in three separate repositories:

  • AB-private issues for issues that must be kept private to the AB - for example, sensitive discussions that may have legal implications. It is recommended to use this repository as little as possible.
  • Member visible issues for the bulk of issues - these are visible to the entire Membership, who are invited to comment on issues.
  • publicly visible issues for projects (e.g. the Vision work) that the AB has chosen to open to the public as well as the Membership.

AB Members are encouraged to participate in issue discussion, and add any they feel need to be discussed at the next meeting to the list of proposed agenda items. Items listed here should preferably be fine-grained, and list specific, well scoped, and actionable items. (The chair can arrange them into topic categories when drawing up the schedule.) See AB-private and AB-memberonly Github issues.

The AB drafts its agendas collaboratively for upcoming meetings:

  • The AB chairs specifically look for issues from the Github repositories that have been marked with the "Agenda+" or "Agenda+ next meeting" labels, as well as issues they are explicitly asked in email to add to the agenda. When marking an issue with "Agenda+" it is recommended to state what goals the discussion should have, and the Chairs will arrange the schedules into time slots with allotted lengths.
  • Agendas are planned by the Chairs roughly a week in advance, although of course agendas may be modified to address urgent issues. Each upcoming meeting agenda is published by the AB Chairs as a page in the AB wiki, and sent in email to the AB and the AC.
  • Each agenda page collects agenda items as a list of links, e.g. to GH issues or to accessible presentation/document to review, with minimal explanatory commentary (because most of that should ideally be in the issue or document) together with a clearly stated purpose for the discussion.

For calls and virtual face to face meetings, time is limited. The following should happen in advance of the meeting:

  • writing briefing material, providing background;
  • reading the materials provided, including proposals;
  • clarification and discussion.

Calls are best used when dialog is needed, and to determine when we have consensus, and to identify conclusions and next steps.

Minutes Correction Protocol

As in many other W3C groups, AB meeting minutes are scribed into IRC. Note that, as the AB sometimes discusses particularly sensitive topics, certain comments and sections may be elided. Post-facto editing is governed by the November 2011 protocol; quoting from the summary of 3-4 November 2011 AB face-to-face meeting record (W3C Member only link):

The Advisory Board, recognizing that the IRC minutes are not a verbatim transcription, adopted a protocol by which each speaker can have their recorded statements edited when he or she feels that what is recorded is either incorrect or needs clarification. Other AB participants can ask a participant to clarify his or her remarks, but cannot insist on a change. The protocol is to send requests in e-mail to the AB list, as the only mechanism to change the minutes generated from the IRC record. The goal is to increase both transparency and coherence.

Past Meetings

After the meeting, the meeting page will link to the minutes for future reference after they have been posted. See the full record of Minutes and Summaries of Past Meetings. Below are F2F wiki pages, most recent first:

2023:

2022:

2021:

  • None

2020:

2019:

2018:

2017:

2016:

2015:

2014: